We have come a long way in five years, but there’s always room to do better! The database engines that I listed above were designed to function in a constrained and somewhat simplistic hardware environment — a constrained network, a handful of processors, a spinning disk or two, and limited opportunities for parallel processing or a large number of concurrent I/O operations.

The RDS team decided to take a fresh look at the problem and to create a relational database designed for the cloud. Starting from a freshly scrubbed white board, they set as their goal a material improvement in the price-performance ratio and the overall scalability and reliability of existing open source and commercial database engines. They quickly realized that they had a unique opportunity to create an efficient, integrated design that encompassed the storage, network, compute, system software, and database software, purpose-built to handle demanding database workloads. This new design gave them the ability to take advantage of modern, commodity hardware and to eliminate bottlenecks caused by I/O waits and by lock contention between database processes. It turned out that they were able to increase availability while also driving far more throughput than before.

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In preview now but you can sign up at the end of Jeff’s post.

Don’t become confused between Apache Aurora (“a service scheduler that runs on top of Mesos”) and Amazon Aurora, the MySQL compatible database from Amazon. (I guess all the good names have been taken for years.)

What am I missing?

Oh, following announcement of open source from Microsoft, Intel, Mapillary (to name the ones I noticed this week), I can’t find any reference to the source code for Amazon Aurora.

Do you think Amazon Aurora is closed source? One of those hiding places for government surveillance/malware? Hopefully not.

Perhaps Jeff just forgot to mention the GitHub respository with the Amazon Aurora source code.

It’s Friday (my location) so let’s see what develops by next Monday, 17 November 2014. If there is no announcement that Amazon Aurora is open source, …, well, at least everyone can factor that into their database choices.

PS: Open source does not mean bug or malware free. Open source means that you have a sporting chance at finding (and correcting) bugs and malware. Non-open source software may have bugs and malware which you will experience but not be able to discover/fix/correct.